post production

July 2018 edit: It's been about a year since I originally wrote this, and it's sparked endless conversations about paper cuts and microaggressions in the post production industry, and even a session with the Diversity Steering Committee at the Motion Picture Edito... last fall. This isn't a problem that's going away anytime soon, but when we talk about it we normalize it. We make it okay to be fed up and frustrated, and we make it essential to find each other and vent it out. I've updated this post a little bit with things I've learned since, and I hope it helps people to understand what women, especially non-white women, are facing in media industries.

For years I've been citing research about women leaving the post production industry in droves once they hit the glass ceiling and have had enough. A lot of people say women leave at this point because they're just not that interested in pursuing it any further or they wish to raise kids and start a family.

Their presence at this point isn't questioned or missed. Half the crowd says "what are you talking about, I work with tons of women" and the other half says "well, what can you do? Women just want to leave."

I'm on the verge of being 32. In what I've experienced of my thirties so far, I have met more women in my age bracket than ever who have changed careers or are seeking to make a change. And this change isn't prompted by unrest or a desire to try new things.

No way. These women? They're tired.

For years I've been citing research and anecdotes from people an arm's length away at least. Now I'm talking about my peers and seeing it happen first hand.

These women have spent the entirety of their twenties and then some trying to prove themselves like anyone does, but they've had to do it even harder. And once they proved themselves they had to KEEP proving themselves. (Yes, men also have to prove themselves. But not because the assumption is that they are naive and non-technical.)

They have had to work to command respect and be treated like peers and not subordinates.

They have had to remind the men (and women) around them that they aren't children but rather experienced professionals.

They've had to have uncomfortable conversations about their family planning strategies or future plans with bosses in order to shake any assumptions away that could destroy their careers.

They've had to constantly balance between being too ambitious or not wanting it hard enough.

They've had to find a way to be strong without being bossy.

They get stuck in assistant editor and coordinator and junior roles while their male peers are promoted more rapidly.

They're paid less for their work and given fewer benefits.

And they're supposed to be grateful for these opportunities.

Women show up at networking events and get hit on, so they have to think hard about what they're wearing and have a plan to leave when a stranger goes too far.

They get over-talked and interrupted during meetings, so they must strategize or force their hand and risk an issue with their tone.

Their opinions aren't taken seriously, so they must carefully craft and design every argument ahead of time.

They're infantilized by their coworkers and must find a way to demonstrate their experience and skills without insulting or threatening anyone.

Their experiences are put down by other women who have bought into the gender bias that pits women against each other.

And on top of all this, they've had to learn and grow as professionals in our industry, constantly meeting new people, finding more opportunities, and gaining new skills. On top of the normal stuff anyone has to do to make it in this industry, women have a whole separate agenda to focus on.

And it's not like we really want to do that. I would love to never speak about diversity ever again. I'd love to just focus on my tech work and build my skills and go home and play video games. But I can't stop talking about diversity until it's resolved.

I know what you're thinking. This industry is hard. Navigating your career is hard. Before you think these women can't cut it, think about this: if you're able to scale a mountain much quicker and easier than a person wearing 50 pound weights on their feet, would you say you're better or more worth of being at the summit than they are?

Because women pursue careers in post and technology with weights on their feet.

Let me give you an example of a simple interaction in your day that exhausts me. If you're a man, maybe you come up to me in the workplace to speak to me and place your hand on my back, a little lower than I would ever expect. You think nothing of it, and you return to your work. In the moment between when your hand touches and leaves my back, I enter a spiral of strategic decision-making: is he going to slide it down? What if he does? Should I ask him not to touch me? If I ask him that, will he think I'm overly sensitive and emotional? Will he tell my mostly male coworkers I over-react to simple things? Will they remember it, even subconsciously, when it's time for me to be promoted? Will I miss out on a key step upward in the company if that happens? Will I stunt my career growth externally? Will I be unable to meet my professional and financial life goals because of it? If I don't say something, am I being complicit in a rape culture? What if it keeps happening and sends a message? What do I do?

Maybe you think this is overly dramatic, but it's vital to every woman to think about the consequences of every interaction on the work life tight rope. And yes, it's incredibly exhausting for women.

And now these women are so tired and I'm watching them leave. They wouldn't leave if they weren't so spent. They would stay and use their incredible skills to tell the stories that need to be told with so many important perspectives.

This is the excessive emotional labor we put on women, which has been well-documented as a major stressor that wears women down. Tack on dealing with an industry with long days, egos, and tight deadlines, and it's a small wonder so many of us make it at all. And women's groups are no better: if technical women are the focus of any organization, it's usually as a requirement to apologize and make up for their own invisibility. Groups that support women in film and women in media really only support certain subsets of privilege women in high level roles, and place the emotional labor on already exhausted women to represent themselves.

Some dissent in the comments on the original posting of this blog mentioned that women being handed the biological task of having babies is just the way it is, and it means a lot more of them are going to leave their careers behind because they have other responsibilities.

It's true that many women do choose to leave employment to raise children. I think that's great. I think men and women both should have that choice presented to them. However, there is no path back into the industry for women who choose to do this. There are women who spent six years raising a son or daughter and wish to go back to work, but no employer will entertain the thought of hiring someone with a gap in employment, regardless of why or how much work they did to keep themselves up to date with their tools.

There is also the matter that there are women who will not choose to have children. You can't assume anything from anyone. Your management contingency plan for hiring women should be to treat them fairly, pay them equally, and restructure your workplace so they can thrive regardless of their choices.

But I can't shake this idea of shrugging off child birth as a simple fact of biology handed to women. There are so many women in this industry who have children and want to return to work within a year. A lot of them can't find a way to make it work, physically or emotionally, and leave. "Ah well," the employers say, "we can't help what responsibilities nature gave them."

We can grow human organs in dishes. We can replace lost arms and legs. We can perform transplants of nearly anything anymore. We can transfuse blood. We can perform c-sections. Biotechnology has never been more advanced -- and you're telling me we can't find a solution to helping mothers stay in their jobs when they choose to stay?

We all need to fight harder to make our workplaces more inclusive and welcoming. We need to do gender bias training. We have to aggressively seek out women to hire and provide a path for ascending within the industry. We need supportive organizations that are truly inclusive and focused.

Because if we don't have these diverse people working in an industry that is evolving and changing so rapidly, we're going to miss out on vital innovations that would allow it to be a sustainable business in the future.

But even worse, we're going to keep destroying passionate women who work hard to stake their claim in our industry. And no matter what that means for your business bottom line, it's plain wrong.

Growing up, I was always glued to the Summer or Winter Olympics. And as a young and ambitious video nerd, I wondered what went into the incredible number of visual stories being told. Luckily I crossed paths with editor Mike Api who is currently in PyeongChang, South Korea, freelancing for NBC in his second Olympic Games. Mike’s “unit” is in the “Control C/Graphics Ingest” unit — that is, the department that cuts promos, sponsorship enhancements, and a few athletic features (or in other words, packages and profiles).

Mike is sending me periodic dispatches from PyeongChang, where he's nearly two weeks into editing the Olympics. Check out part one to get started on his journey.

What's the workflow like for cutting the stuff you cut and then making it to air? What’s the overall technical workflow for ingesting everything else?

The primary source for every network is OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Service), the official host broadcaster for every Olympics. They are a branch of the IOC and provide every media outlet [who has purchased the rights] with what we call the World Feed - literally every second of every event. Any game you see on TV was shot and recorded by OBS. The scope of their production is really impressive. They have cameras all over every venue, plus action cameras like the ones that race along the track/pool/ski slope/whatever, plus a bunch of high tech spidercams, drones, lipstick cams planted throughout the playing fields, on and on and on. Plus god only knows how many microphones dotted all over every playing venue. We get the World Feed plus textless "melts" - reels of the best moments from several different angles, usually in super high speed.

We also have our own production people filming and recording a whole separate slew of ENG material - true speed, super high speed, helicopter aerials, all sorts of fun stuff - on top of all the athlete profiles and cultural features we produce. Our stuff looks really filmic and helps add some color and texture to the broadcast. I have to shout out our ENG shooters for the unbelievable work they do - high-level professionals like Samson Chan, Aaron Mendez, and John Biggins provide us with some really astounding moments.

In addition to cutting sponsor enhancements, promos, and features, we're kind of the central distribution hub for all other departments as well as other broadcasters and venues. Our media managers ingest an ungodly amount of material every day, catalog it, and distribute it to my department. Loggers and PAs watch *everything* that comes in, subclip it, name it, and check it into Avid Interplay. Each editor has a producer in their edit bay, wading through the massive stockpile of material and digging out the gems depending on what our assignments are. PAs also do a lot of digging for shots and moments and even some editing. It's not uncommon for us to be in a pinch, with everyone crashing on their own pieces, and hand a project off to a PA to be cut. After all, they are the first eyes on the material and typically know the footage better than the rest of us. It's a great opportunity for these young bucks. Editors edit, producers edit, PAs edit, everybody's got their hands in the footage.

Editing wise, we're 100% Avid/PC based. Everyone's running on MC 8.9.2 with Symphony enabled, accelerated by these gorgeous whisper-quiet Avid Artist DNxIO boxes. We have a colorist making a color pass on select material upon ingest (usually scenics and specific major features), everything else gets colored in the edit. We work entirely in full resolution since it just wouldn't be practical (or necessary) to have proxies and then uprez later. We need to see everything in high res from the start and get it out as quickly as possible. After cutting, we'll color correct and either mix it ourselves or send it to our Pro Tools mixers in Stamford, CT if it's a bigger or more complex piece. Once we get the mix we export the uncompressed finished product to our EVS servers for playback. (Beyond just the regular HD broadcast, we also do a bunch of 4K HDR, VR, mobile, and even Snapchat stuff, all with their own unique delivery paths.)

Inside the IBC.

Can you give us an idea of how vast the infrastructure is?

It's mind-boggling. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the numbers because they are so comically high:

I think we have something like 2,500 crew members working here in PyeongChang, plus another 1,000 back home in Stamford, CT, some more at 30 Rock in Manhattan, some out at CNBC in New Jersey, plus more in Denver working on Olympic Channel stuff - where most of these sports than only get seen every few years have more regular coverage. This year we're doing about 2,400 hours of coverage (120 something hours a day), around 1,800 of which is live. We deploy 150 of our own cameras and 2 helicopters to accompany OBS's massive arsenal (they had 1,000 cameras in Rio). We have 15 or 16 edit rooms here in the IBC, plus another 15 spread out amongst the venues. I heard we take up around 72,000 sq ft of space within the IBC, which sounds about right. Everything is connected via fiber but I couldn't begin to guess how much cable was used to build the infrastructure. All I know is the 6000mi transfers from PyeongChang to Stamford, CT are lightning fast. The engineering team behind the build are mad scientists, man.

On the media side, it's equally as bonkers. Beyond ingesting the World Feed, our media managers also get about 3-5TB of new ENG material plus another few hundred GB of helicopter stuff every day. There's hundreds of GB of graphics, hundreds of TB of specialty promo footage, and as of today (Day 9) our projects drive is already about 600GB full. That's a lot of metadata! We also have a massive archive of all of our footage from past Olympic games. Storage-wise, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.2PB (or 2,200TB). Like I said, mind-boggling.

When you are working on location, do you have much interaction with the locals? How do you try to experience life through their eyes?

Absolutely! Every Olympics has a local crew of staff and volunteers that work all the events, direct people where to go, assist with translations, man all the security stations, handle all the food, act as local concierges, everything. Getting to know the locals is one of my favorite parts of the job. I mean, why travel around the world if you're not going to meet new people and experience different cultures? My team and I do as much traveling in the country as we can, exploring nearby towns, eating where the locals eat, visiting cultural landmarks, just trying to immerse ourselves in the local life.

A day off in Seoul makes for good Instagrams.

Another great way to meet people is Olympic pin trading. Olympic pins date back to the very first Summer Games in 1896 and are a whole world unto themselves. Broadcasters all have their own unique sets of pins, as do equipment vendors, sponsors, specific venues, host cities, everybody. I've got some from NBC, BBC, Avid, Anton Bauer, CBC, and some classic ones from the 80s. All you have to do is ask for one (typically best to do in the very beginning, as supplies quickly evaporate once more broadcasters arrive at the Games). The local volunteers are here every day with us, so they're essentially our co-workers. Trading pins with them is a really easy way to forge a bond and make someone's day. I've had some really rough days turn around because a local kid was excited that I gave them a cool pin. For us, we go to Olympics every few years so we amass a pretty sweet collection of keepsakes, but for the locals working around us, this may be the only opportunity they have to get some.

Mike's pin collection so far.

[Below is an exchange from Rio that I'll never forget. My friend Karl (on the right) and I were coming into work one day at about 2am, about halfway through the Games. We were both exhausted and really struggling to maintain our energy. On our way in that day, this stoic security guard - who hadn't said two words to us the entire time - stopped us and gently pointed to the pins on Karl's lanyard, asking to trade. In a matter of seconds this guy went from stone-faced serious business to ear-to-ear smiles (as did Karl). He was proud of the Olympics being in his homeland and just wanted as many pins that said Rio on them as he could get. We made his day, he made ours, and believe it or not it gave us a little boost to get through the last week of the grind. All because of a little pin.]

Which past Olympics would you have liked to work?

I really wish I could have worked the Sydney, Barcelona, Torino, London, and Vancouver Games because they're all places I either love or have always wanted to visit. From a historical standpoint, of course I would have loved to have seen the Los Angeles '84 Games and the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid '80. Honestly, I'm still in disbelief that I get to work any of them.

Growing up, I was always glued to the Summer or Winter Olympics. And as a young and ambitious video nerd, I wondered what went into the incredible number of visual stories being told. Luckily I crossed paths with editor Mike Api who is currently in PyeongChang, South Korea, freelancing for NBC in his second Olympic Games. Mike’s “unit” is in the “Control C/Graphics Ingest” unit — that is, the department that cuts promos, sponsorship enhancements, and a few athletic features (or in other words, packages and profiles).

Mike is sending me periodic dispatches from PyeongChang, where the athletic highlights and stunning stories continue to pour out. Check out part one to get started on his journey.

Mike's Olympic 'stache next to the Olympic flame.

What's a typical day like for you now that the games are in full swing?

We work twelve hour shifts and I'm on a 2pm-2am workday this time around. My producer and I have to cut two new pieces every day for a primetime show on NBC affiliates - a show open and a highlight "lookback," which is like a highlight montage of the best moments or stories from that day. Beyond that we'll help out with other deliverables as needed, cutting promos, finishing pieces the day shift didn't have time for, and crashing* on new pieces that may pop up on the spur of the moment (which happened just this week after the men's skiathlon).

* - "Crashing" is an informal term for quickly cutting a new piece from scratch, usually because of some unexpected development or breaking news. In our case, we were asked to crash on a piece telling the story of Norwegian cross-country skiier Simen Hegstad Krueger's... in the men's skiathlon. (He crashed and broke a pole at the start of the 30km race, fell to dead last and made a miraculous comeback to win gold, passing all 63 skiiers in the process.) The whole thing was done with announcer calls from the race, so it was basically us digging through the hour-15 behemoth for little bits and pieces to tell the story coherently. There's more I would like to do with it, but I think it came out pretty cool nonetheless.

Yes on both accounts! We're surrounded by TVs with feeds from all the Comcast Olympic stations as well as direct feeds from the venues so we can see literally everything! I got to attend about ten or twelve events down in Rio but I was also on a 2am-2pm shift, so by the time my day was done there was a ton of things I could go see.

Here in PyeongChang it's a little different since I'm out at 2am and my window is a bit more limited. I'd like to see some luge, bobsled, snowboarding, ski jumping, and alpine downhill if I can swing it. Also, Japanese broadcaster NHK has a special Super High Vision* theater set up in the IBC, broadcasting events both taped and live in stunning 8K/22.2 surround sound. They're testing and preparing for Tokyo 2020 (and have been for years). I saw figure skating yesterday and it looked and sounded like I was sitting in the arena, it was incredible.

[Editor's note for the nerds: NHK's SHV is 7680x4320 10/12 bit 16:9 at frame rates of 59.94, 60, or 120. New to the Super High Vision for this Olympics is the addition of HDR for all events.]

Outside the Super High Vision Theater

Are there any special circumstances you have to watch out for in South Korea?

Nothing too crazy aside from the bitter cold and brutal wind. I've talked to a lot of Olympic long-timers who say this is by far the coldest Games they can remember, which is bonkers considering we're not that high up (around 2300ft) and we're about even with San Francisco latitudinally. I'm lucky enough to be in an edit bay all day. I can't imagine what the camera ops, mixers, photographers, and other production personnel are dealing with out their in the deep freeze.

What's been the best moment of the Olympics so far?

The best moment I've seen so far has been that crazy skiathlon comeback I mentioned earlier, but there are new amazing moments happening every hour. Take your pick: seventeen year old American Red Gerard winning Gold in slopestyle snowboarding (the USA's first medal); figure skater Mirai Nagasu's gravity-defying triple axel; Canada's Philippe Marquis qualifying eighth in moguls with a torn ACL, which is like the most insane thing I've ever heard. Literally every hour of every day some new record is set or a new compelling story develops. And it's still only Day 3!

What has been a personal highlight so far?

My personal highlight so far was getting the opportunity to cut a piece for the Opening Ceremony called Meet Team USA. It was a short stat-heavy feature that aired right before Team USA entered the stadium for the parade of nations. We worked on it in our down time for about 4 or 5 days and I'm really proud of the result. (I'm always my own worst critic and never feel like anything I work on is really ever 'done,' so this was a first for me.)

Basically we started with a long script that was essentially a ton of numbers and names. We knew just yelling figures at people would get tired after a while, so we recorded a scratch VO, picked some music, and went to town pacing it out how we thought it should sound. From there we added some nat sound pops and announcer calls where we felt we needed a little break from the narration. (IMO, this is pretty standard documentary process - lay down your sound first and then elevate it with good visuals to tell the story.)

As my fantastic producer Scott and I mined for better and better shots, the Graphics department built us some cool full screens and animated titles, and hosts Katie Couric and Mike Tirico recorded the voiceover. As always, things kept popping up last minute (in this case athletes dropping out of the Games due to injuries), which meant new graphics as well as new voiceover - not the easiest thing to coordinate when you're hours away from the Opening Ceremony. Once we locked our cut we sent it off to [the NBC Sports home base in] Stamford, CT to be mixed, dropped in the final mix and exported to our playback server about 2 hours before the start of Opening Ceremony.

Mike's Media Composer timeline for Meet Team USA.

How does the constraint of time and deadline work for you in this environment?

In all of these cases, I find myself thriving off the high pressure and time constraints. It forces you to be more decisive and quickly recognize what you like or dislike. You do a lot of relying on your gut instincts since you just don't have the time to second guess yourself or flounder around in "well, I don't know" land.

You have to be creative off the top of your head, trust your teammates, brainstorm new ideas, collaborate, and try things out. Like I've mentioned in previous posts, SOMETHING has to air, so you need to get image and sound on a timeline one way or the other. Personally, I love working like that because at the end of a shift, it's on the air, out of my head, and I'm onto the next thing with a fresh mindset.

Growing up, I was always glued to the Summer or Winter Olympics. And as a young and ambitious video nerd, I wondered what went into the incredible number of visual stories being told. Luckily I crossed paths with editor Mike Api who is currently in PyeongChang, South Korea, freelancing for NBC in his second Olympic Games. Mike’s “unit” is in the “Control C/Graphics Ingest” unit — that is, the department that cuts promos, sponsorship enhancements, and a few athletic features (or in other words, packages and profiles).

Mike is sending me periodic dispatches from balmy PyeongChang, where it is currently mid-afternoon on a Sunday and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, on track to be one of the coldest Games in recent memory. Check out part one to get started on his journey.

The Opening Ceremony is Friday, February 9th, but technically the Winter Games start on the 7th. There are usually some events that take place before the OC because there's such a huge number to get through and scheduling & broadcasting them all means there has to be some crafty logistical maneuvering. There will never be any medals presented before the OC, but some early round robins/preliminary events get the early go. (In this case it's biathlon, luge, alpine skiing, and ski jumping.)

We get here almost two weeks before the opening because there's a lot of work to do! On the editing side, we have a ton of promos, sponsored content, and all sorts of different elements to create beforehand. There are also pieces that were cut in Stamford, CT that will need to be either finished, upgraded*, voiced, or totally recut depending on late-breaking developments (e.g. - if someone gets injured before the Games or if a shoe-in athlete we've been producing a feature on doesn't end up making the Olympics, which always happens). The studio and engineering crews have been here for much longer, building and testing all the studios and technical infrastructure. None of this was here a few months ago!

The International Broadcast Center being pieced together.

This year is especially complicated because it happens to be NBC's turn to broadcast the Super Bowl (in the same week no less!), so a good portion of the crew is still working on that.

Beyond that, we're still shooting new pieces that will need to be cut, colored, voiced, mixed, and ready to go later this week! (To be clear, this isn't due to a lack of planning - some things just aren't possible to do way ahead of time, especially any pieces that involve the athletes physically being in Korea. And again, things always come up.)

* - "upgraded" refers to upgrading the footage. The standards for visuals are very high, so we're always tweaking until we're happy with every shot in a piece. For instance, we may cut with "dirty" (texted) placeholder footage from an old race until we get our hands on better angles or better quality replacements. "Specialty" shoots are where we get the really pretty, really stylized b-roll and scenics that sports tv is known for.

Seoul, South Korea.

In the days leading up to the beginning of the games, what kinds of things are you doing or preparing, in general?

You name it. We're prepping a bunch of pieces we can't actually edit until we get competition footage, cutting a big preview show, cutting all those new late-breaking pieces I mentioned earlier, cutting dozens of sponsorship enhancements* (branded content that act as in-broadcast highlight reels while also serving as ad time), all sorts of jazz.

Right now I'm cutting a special Meet Team USA piece that's going to air directly before the USA walks into the Opening Ceremony! (No pressure at all, right?)

[*An example of sponsorship enhancements would be if Creative COW sponsors the Games and buys 12 sponsorship enhancements with a focus on "teamwork." So as the Games go on, we'll have to deliver 12 mini highlight reels with an emphasis on the best team moments - teammates picking each other up, passing the baton during a relay, celebrating together, etc. People often dog the Olympics for being too ad-heavy, but the fact is without sponsors like Coca-Cola (who is not paying me to say this), we wouldn't be able to broadcast the Games across the world. It's also how they manage to keep the courses, fields, and rinks clear of any advertising.]

Home for the month.

What have you learned is important to bring with you when you work on location in a foreign country?

Copies of your passport are crucial because it can take a really long time to replace a lost passport. Scan it, email it to yourself, and email it to someone else. Prepare a list of emergency contacts in your phone and also keep a physical copy on you. If you wear contacts - bring extras! It sounds obvious but I've gotten burned a few times when a lens popped out or ripped at the beginning of my trip and I had no backups.

It should go without saying but you also need to bring a respectful attitude and be mindful that you are, in fact, representing your entire country abroad. *This is especially important for younger people.* Sometimes you're excited to travel abroad and let loose, but you have to understand that the image you're putting out there is representative of (in our case) the United States and the NBC network. This isn't your home. It's someone else's. You can get plastered and be loud on the LIRR [Long Island Rail Road] and get a few stares but do that in another country while wearing your company logo and that's the image people will associate with the United States. It's not a very good look.

Sight-seeing in Seoul.

How do you prepare emotionally for such a high intensity job that lasts for so long?

Finding a good rhythm and taking care of yourself is essential on these long hauls. The Olympics is definitely a grind; we're pulling 12-hr days 7 days a week for a month straight. If you're staying up late all the time or not eating properly and not getting enough rest it'll catch up to you, your body will shut down, and you won't be productive.

Psychologically, you really need to focus in on the task at hand, forget about social media or any other distractions. and operate on a Left-to-Right mentality. (That's a reference to putting things down on a timeline from left to right, getting ideas onto a sequence rather than wondering IF an idea is going to work.) Just try it and then adjust - after all, something is going to have to air. This is an approach I take to any project, no matter the pressure. Then go back and make it pretty when you have the time. This is not to say there isn't time to think and be creative, but you need to be efficient and focused.

What are you doing in your downtime?

(What is this "downtime" you speak of?!) I try to relax after work, get a good meal in and alternate between doing nothing and doing...something. And it almost always involves food (naturally). In Rio I did a lot of wandering around the Olympic Park checking out different events, and a bunch of days were spent exploring nearby towns. Here in PyeongChang, I happen to be at a hotel smack dab in the Mountain Cluster where nordic combined, ski jumping, and snowboarding is going down.

I have eaten my weight in Korean fried chicken, barbecue, kimchi, and all sorts of fun treats. We're also pretty close to the slide centre so I definitely want to catch some bobsled and luge. We're also pretty close to the high speed train that takes us to the Coastal Cluster where hockey, speed skating (!!), figure skating, and a host of other events are happening. We got an unexpected day off on Friday and took the train to Seoul, which was pretty amazing. Once we really get into the thick of it, I'm sure there will be days where I don't want to do anything but eat dinner and relax. It's a delicate balance of exploring while being mindful of how much rest you're getting.

[Editor's Note: Mike also got a scary warning text this weekend. It turned out to be warning of the impending cold wave. Which is also scary, but not in the way he was probably imagining.]

Growing up, I was always glued to the Summer or Winter Olympics. And as a young and ambitious video nerd, I wondered what went into the incredible number of visual stories being told. Between pre-cut packages and live footage and montages put together with moments that had happened seconds ago, I couldn’t fathom what went into the teams who created this media.

Lucky for all of us, among the nerds I have been grateful to cross paths with is LA-based editor Mike Api. (That rhymes with “happy”.)

For the next few weeks, Mike is in PyeongChang, South Korea, where he’s working as a freelance editor on the Olympics for NBC. Having been through the Olympics editorial experience before — the Summer Games in Rio two years ago — he knows he has a lot of interesting stories to tell us while he’s working.

He also knows life gets crazy on location, so I’m helping him to tell his stories as best we can as they happen. I don’t know how often I’ll post a new dispatch, or how long it’ll be, or how illustrated we’ll make it. But I’m going to ask him a few questions every few days, and he’s going to tell me what he can, and we’ll all have a great time.

Ya’ll, I know the Winter Olympics has its high drama, it’s ups and downs and emotional beats on the skating rink or the ski slope. Wait ’til you hear about the twists and turns of the edit suite. (Think I’m being dramatic? Read below about playing live to the world via an Avid sequence and try not to scream.)

First day in Korea, decked out in swag.

Mike has worked in a bunch of different genres – reality, news, documentary, sports, narrative, music videos, sketch comedy, even a syndicated Good Housekeeping special (if you need advice on the best oven mitts out there, let him know). Most of his unit has been through at least five or six Olympic Games — with one friend, Paul, having been at it since Atlanta in 1996. There are lots of departments that work on all kinds of custom opens or late-breaking features. Mike’s “unit” is in the “Control C/Graphics Ingest” unit — that is, the department that cuts promos, sponsorship enhancements, and athletic features (or in other words, packages and profiles). (To add to the scope of the Olympics, his unit cuts a lot of features, but the large majority of them are done by another unit called Daily Stories. And the deep-dive cultural and investigative pieces are produced and edited over the course of several months, some over several years. They are constantly being rewritten and upgraded right up until the start of the Games.)

“There is a wealth of experience around me, for which I am eternally grateful. Not a day goes by where I'm not inspired by someone else's work or approach to it. I'm a naturally curious person, so these trips are like nerd-brain overdrive for me.”

Mike set off for PyeongChang yesterday and answered my first batch of questions from his Air Korea flight.

What is the process like for arranging travel and going to work in a foreign country — logistically and emotionally?

The NBC logistics people handle all of our travel arrangements and honestly have the most insane job of all. There are thousands of NBC staff and freelance employees from all over the world on-site at each Olympics. That's thousands of plane tickets, hotel rooms, airport transfers, and visas every two years. Not to mention all the cancellations and delays that go along with traveling around the world. It's really impressive.

To say this job is “exciting” would be a gross understatement. The fact that I get to play with this unbelievable material and contribute to such a massive production is something I really cherish. This time I'm doubly excited because I was obsessed with the Winter Olympics as a kid!

That said, my mind is so scattered from wrapping my last job, buying stuff and packing for Korea, and prepping my next project that the reality of what I'm about to do hasn't really sunk in yet.

(Hell, I left my passport at home this morning. HELLO? IS THIS THING ON? I LEFT MY PASSPORT AT HOME. I remembered my sack of Reese's Pieces but forgot the only acceptable form of identification I can use to travel.)

It'll probably hit me once I'm sitting at my Avid on day one, dipping into the footage (which, again, is the most unbelievable footage in the world. I could go on for hours about our cinematographers).

Mike's caption for this was "dope a** inspiring signage" which I think is sufficient.

Tell me about your experience the first time around in Rio. Surely you had a cool experience or two.

Getting the chance to see Olympic events in person is a dream come true. In Rio, I got to see some cycling, swimming, indoor volleyball, fencing (which looks like Tron meets Star Wars and is so damn intense), as well as the US women's gymnastics team gold, the US men's basketball gold, and the single greatest sporting event I've ever been to: the men's beach volleyball gold medal match between Italy and Brazil. It was at midnight on Copacabana Beach in the pouring rain, and by pure luck I snagged a seat in the first row right in front of the Brazilian team. It was insane, the stadium was literally shaking. I was about 20 feet away from the athletes (and completely surrounded by maniac Brazilian fans completely losing their sh-t.) I'm in the background of the medals ceremony awkwardly clapping and shivering.

Beyond that, it's an indescribable rush to edit something — sometimes in only a matter of minutes — and then immediately see your work on the air as a part of the biggest broadcast event on the planet. As a video nerd who lives for behind the scenes stuff, seeing how the sausage is made is my favorite part of the experience.

What’s the craziest thing that happened in Rio?

The craziest thing that happened in Rio came on my very first shift. In fact, it happened right at the start of my first shift.

We were about to open up the first day of the broadcast with a roll-in of the most grandiose Rio scenics we had, accompanied by the classic Olympics score. It's the FIRST thing anyone watching NBC sees of the Olympics — the biggest, swooping establishing shots that have to set the scene for the following three weeks, over which our hosts do their live introduction. A few minutes before air (six, maybe ten minutes), the roll-in failed on the server and wouldn't play. (There are a lot of steps we have to go through as far as naming conventions, codecs, and exports to make sure it plays out and for whatever reason, it failed.)

My supervising producer, showing incredible faith (or perhaps I was the only goon available) gave me the task of banging together a new open - which we did from a bin of scenic selects I happened to start the day before when we were setting up our machines. With no time to export a new cut, we played the open LIVE onto the air straight from my Avid. I've rolled out live-to-air a handful of times in my life but never anything remotely close to this type of pressure. We got the shots, got the music, timed it all out, gave it some pad, and carefully hit the spacebar. My edit bay, now filled with producers and curious PAs, went pin-drop silent and I don't think anybody exhaled until it was finished. That was my welcome to the Olympics.

The ski resort complex where Mike is staying.

What’s next once you land?

Once we land we'll do the accreditation of our media credentials, make the three hour bus ride to PyeongChang (this year's Games are the most remote in history) and get some shut eye. We have a day of acclimatization and hit the ground running on Tuesday, Jan 30th. First up is workflow training with our brilliant senior post supervisor, catching us up on this year's process and any new features we'll be incorporating. We usually have the latest build of Media Composer as well as our own dedicated team of techs from Avid to work out any kinks.

And that, my friend, is just the tip of the iceberg for seeing how the sausage is made. The Olympics is typically when networks push the envelope developing and test-driving new technologies, and sometimes we're the guinea pigs! Once we get a briefing on what new tech we're playing with, then the real fun begins...

Yeah, it’s Tuesday. I lost a day to travel, as I returned to Los Angeles yesterday in a sold out flight filled with exhausted looking film fans and the occasional indie actor. Our scarves and new boots have seen winter, and we’re through with it.

On Sunday I took full advantage of the festival, attending three world premieres in three different places across Park City. Thankfully the relentless snow had stopped and the shuttle service was back on track, allowing me to actually make it to all these films.

I Think We’re Alone Now, directed by Reed Morano, was first up for me. The post-apocalyptic story was just the kind of movie I really enjoy — which can make it hard to review objectively. But I ain’t never said this blog was objective, so screw it: I was into this film. It tells the story of a man left behind after some kind of apocalyptic event has killed everyone where they sat, stood, or drove. And this man is perfectly okay with that because he wasn’t a people person anyway. The best and richest parts of the film are in his routines and the textures they carry on screen. He’s perfectly content with his solitary life in upstate New York. Then one day, a woman shows up — and she doesn’t want to leave.

The cast and crew of I Think We're Alone Now

The conflict of companionship and loneliness that follows this is a really interesting look at how we all cope with ourselves and our needs. And I really loved that the story doesn’t bother to explore why the apocalypse happened or how to rebuild society. This character doesn’t care about that. For him, life goes on. Until it doesn’t.

Seeing Reed Morano’s name in the credits as both director and director of photography is also pretty great. Pretty dang great, yep.

Next up was Search, whose editors I interviewed earlier this week. As I described previously, this is a screen movie that takes place on a computer. But not just one computer or screen — multiple screens. If you’ve seen screen movies before, you might have expectations. This isn’t like that. It’s got zooms, pans, edits, dissolves. It just happens that you’re looking at John Cho’s Mac’s desktop. Search is the story of the disappearance of a man’s daughter and his mission to get her back. While that’s anything but a new story, the way this film unfolds makes it feel new.

The cast and crew of Search

I think it was really smart of the filmmakers (director Aneesh Chaganty and his co-writer Sev Ohanian) to use a story that has some basic building blocks an audience will recognize as a jumping off point for exploring it in an entirely different direction. There are stretches of the film where we’re watching Cho break into his daughter’s Gmail or go through her Facebook friends, and it’s surprisingly riveting. The twists and turns feel earned and realistic. It’s a lot of fun, and it uses some of the modern conventions of internet usage in new and interesting ways. I’m curious how people who don’t use the internet all that much will react to it, and how some of the sight gags involved might play upon a second viewing. The performances in the film are especially good — particularly John Cho, who had to act at a GoPro alone for a majority of the film.

And last for the day was Rupert Everett’s directorial debut The Happy Prince which was — yeah I’m gonna say it — anything but happy. The film tells the story of the final years of Oscar Wilde’s life, picking up after he gets out of prison for homosexuality. Everett also wrote the film and stars as Wilde, and he really does disappear into the role (and into his fat suit) to explore a complicated and sad artist’s spiral into depression and many many bad choices. The other films I saw at Sundance felt like they were trying something new and using their indie status to be a little bit different. The Happy Prince felt more like A Regular Movie you’d see nominated for Oscars and stuff.

But that doesn’t take away from how good I think it actually was. The cinematography and direction was fantastic, and the editing choices were great. From start to finish, it felt like the logical progression of a man’s fall from grace and into exile in France. Realistically it probably won’t stick with me, but I enjoyed having seen it. To punctuate my Sundance experience with an exploration of how we destroy great artists in their time and only choose to celebrate them properly when it’s far too late was an interesting choice — Wilde was pardoned in 2017.

This wasn't pleasant.

Also, I had to stand in the ticket overflow line for like a half hour in 13 degree weather to see it, so I’m glad it wasn’t terrible.

That was the end of my on-the-ground Sundance experience, and by the end I was nearly crawling to my airport terminal. Had I spent the entire week at the festival I wouldn’t be nearly spent because I would have paced myself a little bit more. Packing the full experience into 4 days required a little more of me. But let’s be real: I am aging rapidly and walking 5 miles a day in the snow is not something I am capable of sustaining.

Although I have departed Park City, my Sundance coverage continues this week with a few more interviews from your favorite below the line crew. Going and experiencing the festival first-hand was a really special experience. Sharing that with some old friends and new acquaintances was even more special. It’s been a long time since I stayed up until 3AM with friends talking about life and movies. I don’t share a breakfast table with like-minded people arguing about Avid very often. I never see three movies in a single day unless I’m laying on a couch in my pajamas. I’m thankful for the experience of Sundance and the people I met while I was there.

(I’m also thankful it’s 65 degrees in Los Angeles. But I am also under blankets.)

The threat (or promise, depending on your outlook) of snow delivered today in full force. So much so that I was taken off guard and missed an early screening due to basically being buried in a snow drift. I was born and raised in the midwest, and I started driving at age 16 with a very light front wheel drive vehicle in the dead of winter in a rural area. But it turns out once you live in LA for like, a minute, your natural instincts begin to disappear and you struggle to remain upright.

I was really proud of my snow boots though. Obviously I am not A Winter Sports Person (TM) so I didn’t own boots until last week. Breaking them in here was a risk and it seems to have paid off.

The Egyptian Theater

I read a few articles about preparing to come to Park City, but none of them really prepared me for the extent to which I would be both hot and cold simultaneously all the time. I am thankful I packed a lens cloth in my winter coat pocket to deal with the fogged lenses at every turn. But despite all my whining, it really is nice to play in some snow and be among the film people in such a nice city. (Everyone who lives here and volunteers at the festival is so.nice.)

Main Street

I made a detour off Main Street to spend some time having brunch with Endcrawl at midday. Their service basically makes making end credits easy. I’m a really big fan of the entire idea of Endcrawl, in part because I’ve made credits that suck, and in part because it’s so accessible that indie filmmakers can and do use it. A third of the features in Sundance this year used Endcrawl, which is bananas. I talked to John “Pliny” Eremic briefly over mimosas and scones and asked him: why are end credits so damn hard?

He told me this: "You’re juggling hundreds, sometimes thousands of names. There are a lot of politics involved. There are endless revisions. There’s behind the scenes wrangling with who’s in and who’s out and fixing all the typos and all that. The process for that used to be email chains and it was very 1997. You only want to scroll at certain speeds that don’t jitter, judder, stutter, shimmer, shake — whatever you want to call it. That makes the runtime difficult.”

Yeah, that was also my experience.

Cocktails with Endcrawl

Later on, after tea with a DP (sharing that conversation soon) and coffee with an editor (that one too), I was thinking about the thing I realized makes Sundance really special for me. It isn’t just going to see a lot of movies, or going to see new movies. It’s experiencing movies alongside the filmmakers that made them, and celebrating that along with them. If you’ve ever made a short or a feature or any other expression of creativity and debuted it to a crowd of strangers in a theater or room of any size, you know the nervous excitement just before your art is unveiled. At Sundance, that feeling is on steroids.

Atticus Tea House

Which leads me to The Sentence.

The film is drawn from hundreds of hours of footage shot by director Rudy Valdez, as he tells the story of the incarceration of his sister Cindy and the aftermath of her 15 year sentence for conspiracy charges related to drug crimes her boyfriend committed before he was murdered. Cindy wasn’t involved in drugs. She made some poor decisions with who she spent time with, and she didn’t disclose her boyfriend’s crimes to the police at any point. But it’s clear in the film she is nothing but a kind person who wants to take care of her family.

And originally, the state agreed and threw out the case. But six years later, just six months before the statute of limitations would run out, she was convicted of her boyfriend’s crimes and given the mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years just months after giving birth to her third daughter. From that point, Rudy copes with his sister’s situation, and turns from bystander to director to activist behind the camera over the course of nine years of her story.

From the opening scene of the film, the stakes are made clear: Cindy is taken from her family and all the little moments a young mom gets with her babies — first days of school, funny little games, silly faces, fighting — is taken away from her. The through line of the film is in the heart of her daughters on screen, being interviewed by Rudy as they play in their rooms or sit on their beds. Children are honest, and their perspectives are gut-wrenching. Even more gut-wrenchingly, we’re placed in the shoes of Cindy as we watch the three girls grow up on camera. The oldest, Autumn, begins the film is an adorable 5 year old. By the end she’s a teenager, and the visual of her growing face and the subtle deepening of her voice is heartbreaking.

Rudy describes himself as feeling he’s taken the “coward’s way out”, which I think is a sentiment to which a lot of us who cope with difficulties by documenting our lives in full can relate. But Rudy is the driving force of trying to change his sister’s fate, staying the course as a family is ripped apart by unchanging mandatory minimums and “the girlfriend problem”. And we learn Cindy is far from alone in her struggles as a mom ripped away from a healthy, productive family.

The film is intimate, often filling the frame with the subjects’ faces. Personal moments play out but never exploit. Everyone is just so earnest, trying their best. And Cindy never stops trying to keep the family together, consoling her siblings and parents and children at times over the phone, reminding them that she’s okay, interrupted periodically by an automated voice interjecting that the call is coming from a federal prison.

It was challenging and well-edited, an important story that has real world implications not just for Cindy and her family, but for many thousands of other families. It was a personal film, and I was glad to share the experience of seeing it on the big screen with Rudy.

But then the film ended, and the entire family I had just lived 9 years with over 90 minutes emerged from the audience and stood in front of us.

The subjects and crew from The Sentence

Seeing a narrative feature followed by a Q&A with the cast and crew is a special experience. Experiencing such a vulnerable story with the subjects themselves is on another level.

And that’s really what solidified in my head what makes Sundance worth doing as a film lover.

Before the lush celebrity gift suites, the sold-out Q&A sessions, and the long lines of frozen but eager cinephiles trying to grab the hottest ticket in Park City, a movie was made -- and it was hard work. And behind the producers and directors and actors who led the charge, a "below-the-line" crew of anywhere from tens to hundreds of craftspeople worked to bring filmmakers' visions to life. They're the post production engineers, the editors, the camera operators, or the composers whose names are in the credits but not the numerous story pitches to Sundance press outlets like the COW. Union or non-union, aspiring or veteran, these individuals spent weeks of their life behind the scenes dedicated to telling a story. And in my 2018 COW Sundance Film Festival coverage, I'm telling their stories.

---
On the feature film Searchwhich made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival this week, editors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick were tasked with some hefty new challenges: a film shot almost entirely on GoPro (with a little dash of iPhone and MiniDV) requiring thousands of layers of continuously rasterizing vector files -- which takes place entirely on a screen. Oh, and also Sundance deadlines.

John Cho in Search. Courtesy Sundance Institute.

Thriller Search, directed by Aneesh Chaganty and co-written by Aneesh and producer Sev Ohanian, isn't the first "screen" film -- that is, the first film to take place entirely on a computer screen. But Sev explains it is the first to bring a cinematic approach to the limited "screen" genre. "At first we were kind of hesitant about taking on this project because there was a skepticism we had about not wanting to make a movie that would feel or look like a gimmick. What we think makes Search a special movie, considering we have this crazy visual style on computer screens, is that we put the characters first. And even down to our opening sequence, which encapsulates 12 years of a family entirely from their home computer, the idea was to give audiences a cinematic, visceral experience no different than any kind of movie they'd see -- except that it happens on computer screens."

Aneesh Chaganty

Nick and Will's job? Will says it was "to figure out the execution of that, to make a movie told through computer screens that feels cinematic and not just what you feel when you sit at your computer screen."

Nick added that "as far as we know, I think we're one of the first if not the first "screen" films to cut and punch in [to a shot] which seems like such an obvious idea. Because we were doing that, it created all sorts of really challenging technical situations. That said, we think it creates a uniquely cinematic experience you haven't seen in any other "screen" movie."

This cinematic experience is difficult to fully explain, but once you see it you get it: they cut a movie on a screen just like a movie shot any other way. Close-ups, medium shots, and transitions, the full gamut of traditional storytelling language -- all with shots happening on some kind of screen. This seems obvious in retrospect, but trying to wrap your head around how it would actually look was difficult, even for the film's performers.

During the Q&A session following the Sundance world premiere, actor Debra Messing discussed how it was difficult to understand the script at first, with it being full of stage directions for a mouse and when or where someone would click a button. But then she saw Chaganty's Seeds and understood immediately that something new and special was taking place. This kind of movie needed the right team.

And the USC-driven team has reaped the rewards at the festival. Aside from the Sundance Audience Award for "Best of Next!" and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize (awarded to a film featuring science or technology as a major theme), producer Ohanian picked up the Sundance Institute and Amazon Studios Narrative Feature Film Producer Award, honoring his role as a bold creative producer in an independent space. Oh, and the film has also landed one of the biggest deals at the festival: it sold for $5 million to Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions.

Nick Johnson

And the creative and technical processes were not without major challenges. From figuring out the visual language of the film to sorting out numerous render issues (and diving deep into tech support to help support their need to push the technical limits of Creative Cloud software), Nick and Will had their work cut out for them. And it was to be expected: Will, Nick, Sev and director Aneesh all met during their time in film school at USC in Los Angeles.

Will Merrick

It was at USC that Aneesh established himself as an ambitious filmmaker, directing the wildly popular shot-entirely-on-Google-Glass tear-jerker Seeds, which Sev produced. Sev produced numerous indies, including Fruitvale Station. Sev and Aneesh became writing partners and tapped classmates Will and Nick, who had been working on music videos and features, to cut Search. Sev added that "when the movie was coming together, we knew it was going to be a very different film experience than what we had ever done or most people had done. We knew we needed to put together the best team of editors. This movie could not have been possible had we not had these two guys who not only had to edit this movie, but learn and teach themselves how to do this while they were doing it under insane deadlines."

Sev Ohanian

Creative COW: When you were working out the story in the writing process and pre-production, how much planning about the constraints of the screen medium did you put into post production? Did you plan it tightly, or leave room to figure it out in the edit?

Sev Ohanian: We made the decision very early on to not make this film be an experiment. We wanted to avoid a situation where we would write and shoot the movie, and then figure it out in post. Our intention was that we would make a super-plan of what this film was going to look like before we ever shot anything. We wrote a really tight mystery thriller first. Seven weeks before we started principal photography with our actors John Cho and Debra Messing, we came up with this plan to start editing the movie first. So seven weeks before principal photography, Will and Nick were already editing an animatic of the movie.

The idea was that by the time we really started shooting the movie, we had screened that animatic version to our crew, and people had an idea of what we were trying to achieve. And most importantly, we could make sure the movie had artistic value. That was the idea of us planning and trying to avoid learning the movie in the edit -- so we could focus on the creative parts of the movie in post, not just the technical.

Nick Johnson: And the preparation even went earlier than seven weeks. When we first met with Aneesh, he described these meetings as "rehearsals with the editors". The script was already really incredible, and an unusual piece to read because of the format. Will and I went scene by scene with Aneesh just talking through mouse movements, how we would cover certain things, and what the acts were going to look like, so that by the time we started we could hit the ground running to make sure the animatic was done and ready to go before production started.

Aneesh, Will and Nick working together. Courtesy Sundance Institute

It's an interesting approach that you almost edited the movie backwards.

Nick: It was almost like making an animated film.

Was that difficult to wrap your minds around, editorially?

Will Merrick: Something that was weird was as an editor was that you never really start with a blank slate. On the first day when we came in, we had an empty timeline and had to start screen capping software. Nothing that made the final film was screencapped -- we animated all that later. But for [the animatic] we just sat down and started capturing Facebook, FaceTime, and Aneesh started taking pictures of his face. It really felt like we built it up from nothing.

Nick: Coming into it there weren't that many movies we were trying to emulate. There wasn't an existing template for what we were trying to do. Even in the "rehearsals" we had with Aneesh, I remember trying to understand like, okay what's the language? What are the rules of editing this? If we're in a close-up, can we cut to another close-up? Is it going to be disorienting? Because you're editing on a three dimensional plane. And it's not as obvious as you'd think. I remember early on thinking there'd be certain rules we needed to put in place because the audience would be disoriented. We ended up finding out this wasn't necessarily true.

Will: We broke pretty much every rule eventually.

Do you feel that people weren't as disoriented as you thought because they're so used to looking at screens and interacting with them?

Nick: I do think that's partly why. I also think it's because, at the end, we were just using traditional cinematic language. Audiences are used to those sorts of shots, that sort of editing. I think the thing we needed to get over was "so what, it takes place on a computer screen." We still had to treat it as a movie. We could have dissolves, we could cut from close-up to close-up. People are used to seeing that.

Nick and Will working together in Premiere Pro. Courtesy Sundance Institute.

Can you tell me about your technical workflow and how you worked together on that?

Will: We began by creating the animatic, but because we made it all layer by layer in Premiere, when the live action came in we would sit in the office and edit it into the animatic. That became our first editor assembly. From there we worked in Adobe Premiere -- we would build everything in a wide shot and put that in a nest, and we'd put the temp camera moves outside the nest. It made timing very hard. Every time we changed timing we'd have to go into the nest and move everything, come out of the nest, change the camera moves.

Nick: We had a transcode process to ProRes [for the live action footage] and kept all that [instead of conforming to camera originals]. [Search] was almost all shot on GoPros, so it's all H.264. We had an incredible assistant editor -- who posts a lot on Creative COW by the way, Angelo Lorenzo -- who did the transcoding.

Will: After all that was done, which was tedious and painstaking, we picture locked and sent the entire movie to After Effects where we replaced almost everything in the film with Illustrator files we made partially working with a VFX company called Neon Robotic, so everything would be infinitely scalable and we could make our real camera moves and punch ins.

Nick: The big thing we quickly learned, and we knew to some degree going in, was that we weren't able to screen record anything because we would need 16K monitors in order to capture that stuff. So almost everything you see in the movie, with the exception of the live action, has been drawn in Illustrator and animated in After Effects. We had to recreate, line for line, Facebook, iMessage, Finder windows -- and every click state would have "states" for when the mouse would click. And then we motion captured the mouse in everything. Everything you see is animated in After Effects.

Will: For color, we had all our live action footage within elements in the screen, sometimes more than one in a shot. And you can't color the screen itself because you'd mess up the white and black levels. We did color in After Effects, and we found this great colorist Zach Medow who does temp color on a lot of big movies. And because he does that, he knew how to work in After Effects, so he went in and used the Color Finesse Tool on all the live action element.

Nick: Which has to be one of the most tedious things a colorist could ever do.

Will: He had no real time playback whatsoever. He had to watch a reference and go back to color. Once he was done with that, we made an export from After Effects and put that through Da Vinci Resolve to put some extra vignetting and blurring in, and a little bit of contrast on the final film itself.

Nick: We tried for a long time to figure out how to get just the live action footage into Resolve. The reason we didn't is because we had so many layers, and layers upon layers. And sometimes the Finder window would cross in front of a piece of live action, and sometimes it would go behind. There was no good way to isolate that and then slot it back in. The online process would have been really difficult. A lot of this movie and its technical processes, I remember thinking "there's gotta be a better way to do this." But we exhausted every possibility and eventually it was like I guess we'll do it this way.

Behind the scenes, John Cho in Search. Courtesy Sundance Institute.

How did the constraint of the "screen" play to your advantage as editors?

Nick: For one, the most obvious thing is that unlike a normal movie where you have to live with how the footage is, we could rearrange anything. It's an animated movie, so if a certain action is taking too long, we could just create a button on a page and have it happen instantly. Cutting a "screen" movie gives you the advantage of making changes.

Will: It's a bit more first-person than a normal movie, which allows me to convey more things like the production design of the character's desktop through deeper character traits that are hard to convey through dialogue.

Nick: That was really fun too. There's a performance aspect to the mouse. You're constantly in the character's head. A lot of the mouse performances, you're performing as the main character. That was really fun, to almost be acting.

Because on the screen you can show the hesitation of the mouse, or something like that?

Nick: Exactly, that was one of the most fun parts of the movie for sure.

This film uses the technology inherent in our daily lives to tell a story. What does it say about the role technology has to play in our lives?

Will: There's a lot of films or like Black Mirror, warning us about technology and I think this film does that but it's also an affirmation about technology. Technology is good AND bad, it shows both sides.

Nick: In creating the movie, our intention was always to be as true to real life as possible. It was always the idea to be as true to our experience interacting n the internet as possible. Whether or not you read into the commentary, you think yeah this feels real and true to my experience. We were always careful to not be too heavy handed on any sort commentary.

You're featured in the "NEXT" section at Sundance, which is described as a set of films "distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling." Do you have thoughts about where else storytelling is going?

Nick: There are so many possibilities.

Will: Virtual reality is really interesting.

Nick: VR is one of the most exciting things to me. I do think there are some really interesting things you can do with "screen reality" movies too.

Will: I think the Lytro cameras will also change everything, at least about how movies are made. I think you'll start to see in the screen element, as the gimmick is worn out, there will be movies that incorporate screen scenes or moments, like how you see text bubbles popping up now. So if you have a live action movie and one scene is more conveniently told through a computer screen, maybe it'll just be told that way. Who knows where it'll go from there.

Boarding my flight from LA, I knew I was in for an interesting trip when half the people around me were already wearing snow boots and hats. It was a chilly morning by Southern California standards, but my sweaty self was regretting even wearing a long sleeved shirt. (I really enjoy visiting cold places because I can walk outside and be comfortable. But I obviously don’t like living in them.)

Inside my press credentials, I was surprised and pleased to see a number for a hotline the festival created with the Utah Attorney General’s Office to report harassment, sexism, abuse, and discrimination. I hope other event organizers are taking notice (hello, NAB Show) because this is an obvious tool that should have been implemented years ago. It’s been an after-thought for so long, and it’s finally at the forefront.

The insert was inside all festival badges.

Wandering Main Street involved spotting actors I know whose names are on the tip of my tongue, people I worked with on projects in the past, and people I’ll probably work with in the future. And talking a lot about the threat of snow.

Adobe’s “Art of the Edit” panel this afternoon featured three Premiere-using editors discussing their craft and how it has and hasn’t changed. It’s striking to me how the number of self-taught, never-really-got-training editors are beginning to really take hold and outnumber the old guard. This is in large part thanks to accessible software like Premiere and After Effects. I think it won’t be terribly long before we have entire panels of established, experienced editors who don’t have a film-related anecdote. (I also think this is just fine.)

Adobe's panel on the art of the editor.

At the premiere of Lizzie I got my first taste of the Sundance screening experience: the ticket holder line, the sad glances from the waitlist line, and the buzz in the theater as a fresh, new movie begins. Lizzie is a psychological thriller based on the story of Lizzie Borden and the axe murder of the Borden family, directed by Craig William Macneill and edited by Abbi Jutkowitz, starring Chloe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Sevigny and Stewart are definitely at their best in the film with great characters and occasionally sharp dialogue, which is quiet, tense, and slow to build. But when it builds, it gets downright scary. It’s not surprising to add that Lizzie is pretty violent, and as I was thinking about my take on the film, I wondered if seeing a woman involved in this level of carnage (in a non-pulpy sense) was unconsciously affecting my opinion. It’s going to take a while before I really have a clear opinion, but I do know this: Lizzie ended up being a challenging and timely depiction of female rage.

The cast and crew of Lizzie in a Q&A after the screening.

Aside from the bustle of Main Street and the thrill of seeing new films, it’s also worth mentioning that just getting away and being around friendly faces — particularly those in our shared condo, which is full of television and film editors — has been appreciated and necessary. Three of us took a break from the Sundance scene this evening and made dinner at home, sharing olives and tapenade and red wine next to the fire. I love the theme of the sharing of stories at the festival, especially when they’re our own.

Before the lush celebrity gift suites, the sold-out Q&A sessions, and the long lines of frozen but eager cinephiles trying to grab the hottest ticket in Park City, a movie was made -- and it was hard work. And behind the producers and directors and actors who led the charge, a "below-the-line" crew of anywhere from tens to hundreds of craftspeople worked to bring filmmakers' visions to life. They're the post production engineers, the editors, the camera operators, or the composers whose names are in the credits but not the numerous story pitches to Sundance press outlets like the COW. Union or non-union, aspiring or veteran, these individuals spent weeks of their life behind the scenes dedicated to telling a story. And in my 2018 COW Sundance Film Festival coverage, I'm telling their stories.

------------------

A lot of assumptions are made about post production assistants, or "post PAs": that they simply fetch lunch, sort M&Ms by color, or other "small" tasks dolled out at the whim of a producer. But Briana Kay Stodden's career so far has been anything but minor. After jumping from rural Illinois to New York City, she has served as post PA on some of the most talked-about shows and movies of 2017 and 2018: Oscar contenderMudbound, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Golden Globe winner The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel -- and now making its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week, Private Life directed by Tamara Jenkins.

Briana graduated from Southern Illinois University with a BA in Cinema Studies and spent her college years working in news. Upon graduation, her partner Eric was offered a job at Light Iron in New York. They moved together, without so much as a quick visit to NYC before the relocation. "There was a lot of uncertainty in those first few months and being unemployed was scary for me but I had a few projects I did from home that kept my bills paid."

Briana Kay Stodden

Those side hustles involved producing an educational video series about working in post for the City of New York and mixing short films from her home studio: key aspects of her success as a PA in the competitive post production industry of New York. "I'm so grateful for my time as a Post PA because it helped me understand all of the different jobs available in post. Because of this, I was able to learn about myself and what I like and don't like. When I started my first Post PA job I was CERTAIN I wanted to be an editor -- but through my side projects, I discovered post sound is what really makes me want to get out bed in the morning.

Briana is moving up and out of the post PA role and into a 2nd assistant editor role at a documentary company where she hopes to return to her journalistic roots. But before she goes, she's got some great insight about the role of the post PA: how to succeed, how to be a good person, and how to think of yourself as anything but small.

Private Life, Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Creative COW: How did you get into your first post PA job?

Briana Stodden: When I moved to New York, all of my previous work experience had been in news but I was eager to work in film. Finding a job here was extremely difficult at first because I was applying for post jobs but I didn't understand why I wasn't getting any callbacks. I had almost completely given up on trying to get a job in post and I started to look for jobs in news.

Then one night, Eric came home and said an editor at Light Iron was needing some help organizing her edit room. I thought it would be a fun project to get me out of the apartment which was still full of unpacked boxes. Plus, I needed to get away from an inbox that continued to taunt me with no job offers. Little did I know, the editor turned out to be the amazing Susan E. Morse and what started out as a couple of weeks worth of helping her to set up her edit room turned in to my first official Post PA job.

How do you continue to find jobs?

All of my Post PA jobs since have come by recommendations from assistant editors or post supervisors that I have worked with on various films. At first, I didn't know many people in the post industry but going to post gatherings such as those hosted by the Blue Collar Post Collective (BCPC) really helped me make friends and learn more about how the industry works. Some days, I still can't believe that this small-town Midwesterner has worked on shows like, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with director Amy Sherman-Palladino or Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It.

However, working as a Post PA on Private Life was one of the most fun and educational environments I've experienced in the industry thus far. I had already worked with the editor Brian A. Kates on the pilot for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel so I had an idea of his workflow.

However, what I really enjoyed observing were the interactions between him and the director Tamara Jenkins. He also edited her previous film The Savages so from day one of watching them work, I was seeing two old friends collaborate to tell a beautiful story and it was everything you imagine filmmaking should be. No matter how difficult or challenging the workday might have become, it was always a good day because I was working with good and kind people and that is what really matters.

Director Tamara Jenkins, Courtesy of Sundance Institute

What's a typical day for a post PA like? How can someone shine as a great PA?

It seems a lot of people think Post PAs just order lunch -- and on some days I admit ordering the lunch was so time-consuming it seemed that was all I got done that day. However, the Post PA's job is much more than that if you are willing to learn and do the work.

If you get the chance to start a Post PA job while the film is still in production, you might get to help the assistant editor set up the editing room. I've found it really helps to get to know the post facility staff in the building where you work so can reach out to them when you have questions. I also like to walk around the neighborhood and learn where some great lunch, coffee, and drugstore options are so I can suggest them when they are needed. And I will already have some takeout menus collected.

Additionally, if your assistant editor requires you to fill out the post crew's time cards or summarize the petty cash expenses throughout the job, it helps to get to know the production's accounting department. I've learned every film does things a little differently, so you can't assume that the paperwork procedures from one job to the next will be the same. The accountants love it when you ask questions early on and avoid simple mistakes later. (You should also show that you appreciate them by writing legibly on all paperwork and by bringing them donuts.)

While the film is still shooting there is a lot of paperwork that has to be organized such as camera reports, editor's logs, and lined script pages. Every editor and assistant editor will have a different way of doing things so it's important to ask questions and revise your workflow as they require.

During the director's cut, things start to slow down a little, but this is a great time to observe and learn from your assistant editor if they are able to show you some of their workflow. However, be respectful of their time and make sure you aren't distracting them while they are providing support for the editor or the director.

Between paperwork, running errands, or ordering lunch, I found it was a good time to practice tutorials online or read up on developments in the industry. It's easy to forget sometimes but these film jobs usually only last about 6-8 months, and as a Post PA you have access to incredibly smart and talented people. Depending on the editing room setup, you might only get small windows of opportunity to ask questions or interact with the editor, assistant editor, or the director, so you want to be knowledgeable and prepared to take advantage of those moments.

For example, I like to make lists of questions to ask should I get the chance. Those questions could be about something technical or something like, "On this film so far, what edit are you most proud of?" These kinds of questions open up a dialogue, and you will learn more from the stories around the lunch table than you ever will from surfing your Facebook or watching YouTube videos, so always be ready. You might not get all of your questions answered and that is okay, just stay engaged.

Are there any odd tasks you've had to do as a PA?

Every job is unique and every post crew has different needs. It's important to find joy in any task even if it seems small and unimportant. Overall, the Post PA is there to help keep the editing room running smoothly and do whatever is needed to keep the editor, director, and the AE focusing on the film's creation.

This could mean running to the store for cold medicine, special ordering Red Vines to make the director feel more at home, or assisting the post supervisor. Sometimes this extra effort seems thankless, but it will be noticed by the people who are watching and those are often the people who will ask you to do more work with them in the future.

Did any of these out of the ordinary tasks come into play during Private Life?

I'm really proud of my work on Private Life but I felt especially useful to the director during one of the film's early screenings. Before the film was locked, Tamara expressed how helpful it would be if we could record the laughter in the theater during the screening to know if certain moments in the film were getting the reactions that she had intended. Thanks to my interest in sound mixing and to my previous work on personal film projects, I had my own field recording kit. Not only was I able to record the laughter from the screening, but I also captured the Q&A afterward and she was able to reference it as she finished the film.

What kind of challenges have you had to overcome as a PA?

An interesting challenge I had to overcome as a PA was learning how to read the room. Every job is different, and when tensions are high and deadlines are approaching it's hard to know how you can be useful. Your assistant editor or post supervisor can be your best allies during these moments, and it is best to ask what is expected of you if you are not sure. It might be the most helpful thing to just stand back, observe, and be ready when you are called upon.

What do you think are some of the most important assets a PA has?

In my opinion, being organized, dependable, and enthusiastic about your work are requirements for all jobs. But the most important asset for a PA is a great personality. In post, you have to work in small, cluttered offices for several hours a day. It's important for the editing room atmosphere to stay positive and kind.

You and everyone around you are working hard, and sometimes you may want to vent your frustrations but resist that feeling if you can. Remember that talking negatively about someone might feel like friendship and trust-building, but you can't make a real connection that way. Your number one goal as a PA should be to leave a lasting, positive, and trustworthy impression on your co-workers. Besides, they will be the ones you run in to at all the post holiday gatherings.

What's some advice you have for people who are maybe about to get their first post PA gig?

Don't give up. When I go to post gatherings like the BCPC meet-ups, I often meet people who were just like me and trying desperately to get a job in the editing room but can't seem to get their foot in the door.

What helped me finally break through this barrier was an overhaul on my résumé. When I got out of college I had what I thought was a perfect résumé: organized, easy to read, and full of all the editing related jobs that I had done.

However, a wonderful AE took the time to show me ways to improve my résumé and showcase the duties specific to what a Post PA is required to do. It's a good idea to highlight your future career goals in a cover letter, but the people who are doing the hiring want to know that YOU know what your role is and that you will be focused on supporting the editing room without doing any actual editing. And don't worry, you will get your moment to shine and showcase your other skills after the job has started.

Briana's home workspace.

What is the path upward in post production for a PA, and how can other people in the cutting room help PAs with that ascension?

Two words... Side. Hustle. The post industry is a little broken right now in that there aren't very many opportunities in the editing room for Post PAs to get actual editing experience which is needed to further their careers. All of my actual editing, AE, and audio experience have come from small non-union jobs that I've picked up in addition to working as a Post PA. These opportunities have come from other AEs with whom I've expressed my desire to learn, and they have graciously let me help out on their side hustles and gigs. While you are building your reputation and skills, focus on what you can do for other people who have more experience. Don't come to them with an attitude of "What can you teach me?" but rather "How can I help you?" This will make all the difference.

Two more words... Speak. Up. On Private Life we were all at lunch one day and the director asked me what my career goals were. I admitted that I was grateful for what I had learned working in edit rooms, but I have discovered I am more interested in post sound. She and Brian (the editor) got excited hearing this and then offered to let me come and sit in at the mix stage. It was incredible watching the film come together like that. In between the mixing sessions I was able to ask the sound engineers questions about their workflow which I have now applied to my home mixing sessions. I am so lucky that Tamara and Brian are the type of people who would invest in my interests like that. I will never forget their kindness.

As you move on from your time spent as a PA, what final advice do you leave behind for future PAs?

If there is one thing I would like other aspiring Post PAs to know it's what you do matters. I am lucky to have worked with some incredibly kind and generous people. But some days it can be overwhelming when your job entails minding all the little things and it seems everyone around you is doing all the big things.

Some people may knowingly or unknowingly make you feel small while you are doing the small things but remember you are enough. You deserve to be in the room.

You won't learn everything you need to know from one job. Moving up in the industry will take time and this is YOUR time to determine what path you want to take. Choosing a different path than the one you thought you wanted does not mean you have failed, it's just part of the process.

While I was interviewing foley artist Joanna Fang for the post educational video series that I produced last year, she inspired me by saying, "This industry asks you to be very good at a specific task. So go out there, find that task and don't be afraid if you fail." That's what I am striving to do. To summarize: I want to encourage you to be kind, work hard, and keep going.

Tomorrow morning, I'm jetting off from sunny Burbank to snowy (frigid, icy, frozen) Park City, Utah to cover the 2018 Sundance Film Festival here on the COW. I've got furry snow boots, long underwear, and a handful of tickets that cover everything from the fest's most anticipated to most experimental offerings. And I've got my own angle.

Before the lush celebrity gift suites, the sold-out Q&A sessions, and the long lines of frozen but eager cinephiles trying to grab the hottest ticket in Park City, a movie was made -- and it was hard work. And behind the producers and directors and actors who led the charge, a "below-the-line" crew of anywhere from tens to hundreds of craftspeople worked to bring filmmakers' visions to life. They're the post production engineers, the editors, the camera operators, or the composers whose names are in the credits but not the numerous story pitches to Sundance press outlets like the COW. Union or non-union, aspiring or veteran, these individuals spent weeks of their life behind the scenes dedicated to telling a story. And in my 2018 COW Sundance Film Festival coverage, I'm telling their stories.

I'll be talking to directors and producers and writers of course, and I'll tell you all about the films I see and the scene that's set in Park City, but my goal is to bring you insight into the daily lives of the crew -- the ones with the 10 or 12 hour days, the ones who worked their way up through unpaid "for exposure" promises, and the ones who unwaveringly service someone else's story.

In our current political climate, in Hollywood and everywhere else, learning more about each other and respecting one another's work and life has never been more important. The #MeToo movement has opened a dialogue we've never been able to have with each other before. Time's Up, the legal defense fund set up support those who have experienced sexual harassment, assault, or abuse in the workplace, is making the right moves toward keeping that dialogue happening and protecting those who want to have it.

But we can't forget our below-the-line crew in these conversations. For every actress who has been assaulted by a filthy producer, or every director coerced by a power-hungry executive, there are thousands of female crew members in production and post who are caught in a nuanced power struggle every day. Many of them are harassed, assaulted, and abused too. Most of them can't or won't ever speak up because they remain in a position where they would lose work, maybe forever.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

#MeToo is going to shape a lot of Sundance coverage this year because it's going to change how we view the films in the festival. That will be challenging for some people who have old traumas reawakened, and offensive to others who view equality as a loss of power. But regardless of your opinion or your past experience, something has shifted and its affecting Hollywood -- and the best thing we can do is try talk to each other. A lot.

In the coming days I've got conversations to share with operators, assistants, producers, editors and many more. I'll be sharing what I see here on this blog, as well as shorter, quicker takes on my Twitter and Instagram feeds. Film and television editor Meaghan Wilbur will also be on the ground in Park City serving as a contributing editor and tweeting some #hottakes from the theaters.

Last week, a young woman on Twitter told me she had read an old blog post I wrote and immediately related to it and needed more information. The post, titled “Professional Fears”, was published on February 5, 2010. As a recent graduate, she told me she was being held up with exactly what I wrote about and wanted to know how I moved past it.

My initial reaction: wait, I've moved past those fears? Says who? I’d forgotten all about this post and hadn't read it since I wrote it and sent it off to the internet six years ago. That’s not to say I haven’t been in the throes of job-related fears ever since. Of course I have. Everything is scary and loud and I have to make my own doctor appointments and pay bills and everything.

But I hadn’t been obsessing over a specific list, so I wondered what I had decided to commit to internet paper as a formal post and re-read the blog.

And I was surprised. I was surprised at how quickly I could return in my head to this place six years ago where I was feeling overwhelmed and ineffective, desiring direction and getting none. I remembered it all immediately.

But I was even more surprised that I have conquered every one of these things, mostly without really acknowledging it. That’s the thing with growing up: you fall into playing the long game, and your accomplishments and successes (and failures) are a part of every day life.

Here’s my list of the biggest, scariest, most crippling fears I had six years ago, and my thoughts about them now.

“1. that I don’t know as much as I should know right now. Like maybe I’m not reading the right things, studying the right books, finding the right projects.”

Maybe I knew what I needed to know, maybe not. A lot of young people fear that they didn’t get everything they needed out of college. Whether you did or didn’t, it’s your responsibility to continue learning beyond your degree or other training, forever and ever. And obviously I was reading the right things and finding the right projects, because I also blogged about them around this time — and understood the importance of continued education and building relationships.

“2. that I want to be an assistant editor yet I would have absolutely no idea what to do.”

Turns out there are a ton of amazing resources out there for whatever you want to do, and you just have to ask people about their experiences and advice to get the most valuable information out there. And for what it’s worth, I never ended up being an assistant editor, but I train people to perform many of those tasks now.

“3. that I will get a great project and totally blank out and screw up the edit.”

This never happened. Not even close. This is pure anxiety — if you think these thoughts, please remind yourself that you’ve got your work under control.

“4. that I don’t know Final Cut well enough to compete.”

Pure anxiety too. I knew FCP better than anyone in my college class, and I worked endlessly to get better. If you try to do something and you want to do it, it’s not that difficult to be competitive.

“5. that I’m spending too much time learning Final Cut and forgetting Avid. Should I dig up Avid and some books and dig into the technical side of it? Or will it become natural?”

So I learned both. I took on the rough cut of a feature and did it in Avid. It was hard, but I did it because software is finite and can be learned. Now I worked in Avid every day, and solve Avid problems 24/7. The other aspects of being a good worker are harder to learn — but you can buy books on Avid Media Composer. (And if you want to work in TV or film at a high level, please do learn Avid. It’s just software, but it does take a little time.)

“6. that I don’t know enough about After Effects. Do I need to learn more? I want to for my own interests, but if I want to edit movies someday, how does this play in?”

I struggled with After Effects in college (and wrote about this at length for the COW) because I didn’t really grasp that it wasn’t an NLE and I resented that it didn’t come naturally. When I was hired at my first real editing job, I realized that a majority of the work was going to end up being in After Effects. I was a little panicked at first because I wasn’t super fluent, but I just dove in and figured it out. I challenged myself to do something new with every video I produced so I would continue to learn instead of just relying on a handful of tricks.

I don’t necessarily want to edit movies myself now, but I think it’s perfectly clear how After Effects can help an editor. Whether I approve or not, everyone that watches a rough offline cut wants to see something finished looking — having comping skills is seriously helpful to an editor nowadays. And if you aren’t cutting movies, it’s really useful to be able to take on title sequences or have a good understanding of making a nice lower third or adding other effects to push the production value without adding labor.

“7. that the fact I don’t have 3D experience will bite me…somehow..”

Nah. While there is an overall push to be a generalist and it’s good to have an idea of how things work, I believe everyone should have their specialty. I don’t see a trend for generalists to also have 3D expertise even now.

“8. that I will get a freelance gig, go to their edit suite, and get performance anxiety. especially in front of a producer.”

Never happened. Not even close. It was obviously hard at first, but nothing like this.

“9. that I will not be able to edit at the caliber in which I want to edit.”

I think anyone thinks about this at any stage of their career, whether they’re an offline editor or some other area of post. They want to be the best. You can’t be the best until you’ve put in the work and the time. That’s the hardest part about growing up and growing as a professional: this takes time. Be patient, appreciate the skills you currently have, learn from those who have come before you.

“10. that I’ll start being told that my work sucks.”

Everyone worries about this until the end of time. If they don’t worry about this, they probably don’t care anymore. If you work for someone that literally says to you that your work sucks, maybe reconsider if they should be in charge of you. But be prepared for negative feedback. It happens. A lot. Things don’t work. Clients don’t like it. Learn to interpret negative feedback and figure out what the real issue is, and don’t take any of it personally. This is a process, and it’s a team sport.

“11. that I’m not going to get to edit the stuff I really want to edit.”

This is interesting because what I was really getting at was “I’m never going to get out of corporate trucking videos.” And through hard work, building relationships, and choosing my next moves wisely, I absolutely did. Because of the economy and other factors, I worked in corporate video for four years. I didn’t spend this time wallowing and pining for Hollywood (at least not exclusively) but rather I took other side projects to keep myself happy and learning. I read everything I could find.

I taught people things and asked them to teach me. I met everyone that would meet me. I traveled to events and trade shows whenever I was able — which was not often because I was very underpaid. I took advantage of the fact my video editing job was a 9-5 M-F gig that afforded me the ability to spend a lot of time enriching myself. After a long, difficult road where I learned a lot about my work and my self, I now work on network television and major feature films in a capacity that utilizes my entire post production skill set.

And it’s important to emphasize that I don’t go about my career fearlessly plowing through barriers to get whatever I want. Everyone has anxieties about if they’re on the right path, if they’re doing enough, if they’re working hard enough or too hard. It’s just the way life is for all of us. You have to find a way to prevent these fears from becoming so crippling that they prevent you from action.

Generally speaking, if you’re worried about this and you’re studying and doing the work to make yourself better, you’re already a step ahead of anyone who isn’t thinking about their future on a daily basis. Find good mentors that will help affirm you (or call you on your BS if you need it.) Just keep pursuing what you want to pursue. Acknowledge that you’re afraid, but don’t define yourself by your fears. And if you find yourself getting too hung up on anxieties, try to speak to a professional.

I think most of us get into post production because we thought it was fun. As time goes on and it becomes actual work, it becomes less fun and more about being the right combination of high performing and lucky. There are risks involved, and this industry asks a lot of a young person. Sometimes more than they can possibly offer.

If you’re young and trying to make peace with your new adulthood fears, just listen: be patient. It’s gonna be really hard. But if you do the work, things are going to be okay. There are people who have crawled through the barriers to entry not THAT long ago that are working and recognizing that you need your break, and we're trying to find you too.

Did you know the #allmalepanel is such a common phenomenon that a UN organization is urging its employees (and 8,500 member organizations like Coca-Cola and Cisco) to stop participating in them? “There is no shortage of qualified women," says executive director Lise Kingo.

The post production industry is no exception to the all male panel phenomenon. From SMPTE to NAB to ACE, our community is vibrant, filled with podcasts, articles, meet-ups and classes. Trade shows feature product demonstrations and broad concept discussion panels of all sorts. Enrichment is important to us. The most frequent recurring advice we give to young people is “never stop learning” and “meet lots of people,” which we accomplish through these extracurriculars.

But our events and podcasts and demos are not diverse, not even kind of diverse. While the post production industry as a whole is lacking in women for reasons I’ve written about in the past, the people that are chosen to speak, teach, and represent us to ourselves are even less diverse.

There is no shortage of qualified women for post either -- I would like to introduce you to a few dozen women (and counting) you can add to your contacts next time you need a demo artist, podcast guest, or beta tester with our Women in Post PR List, available as a regularly updated PDF with a version you can download now.

I’ve recently begun asking people in the post industry why their events only feature male experts.

“I don’t know any women who are interested.” “I booked a woman, but she had to cancel.” “All the women I know are working!”

There is a disconnect between the largely male pool of people in charge of these various stages and women who are experts in their part of the industry. This is true of all industries where men dominate the selection of “experts” to the public.

In the media, one journalist discovered that men are more often interviewed as experts in news articles, and men cite themselves more often than women.

In academia, women who co-author academic papers with men are less likely to get tenure than the men.

And on the site allmalepanels.tumblr.com, you can see examples of all male panels from hundreds of other trade shows and events across the world.

From allmalepanels.tumblr.com -- Royal Television Society’s Special Camera’s talk - all men including chair

It shouldn’t be difficult to find women who can speak on behalf of their work, but many men say it is. So alright, you tell me you don’t know any women who are interested or available or panels or workshops or classroom talks. Your follow up question should be: “how can I help change this?”

In partnership with London-based editor Siân Fever, I’ve put together a simple document and form for creating a database of women who are experts in different topics in the post production community. Women can fill out the form and add themselves to the list. Once a month, Siân and I will update and distribute a nicely formatted PDF containing the information of all women who have added themselves to this list.

At NAB 2015 -- Working Together to Close the Gender Gap with Me and Siân, and Megan McGough Christian, Ellen Wixted and Amy DeLouise

It’s still a work in progress, and we’re still figuring out the best way to handle the flow of names and updates (and accepting feedback and assistance to make it bigger and better.) But it’s a start. And it’s hardly a new concept — Binders Full of Women has been doing the same thing in journalism since Mitt Romney uttered the phrase in 2012, and Ms in the Biz has a database for female filmmakers from all kinds of jobs. We’re focused on post production only: engineers, editors, vice-presidents, assistants, coordinators, CTOs, supervisors, sound editors, everything post.

Here’s what everyone needs to do right now:

Women: add yourselves to this page, even if you’ve never thought of yourself as someone that should be speaking as an expert. Your voice is important in this industry. Women are less likely to declare themselves an expert and seek opportunities to be on a stage in their career field. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think a big one is because being the only woman in a room full of men makes it feel like more is at stake -- if people don't perceive you well, you're doing a disservice to your gender.

The Confidence Gap is a real thing, and I've struggled with it too. It's difficult to walk the tight rope of being assertive but not "bossy", to feel self-assured but not egotistical. We're brought up to play by the rules, and we think that if we work hard we'll be plucked from the masses to be on a stage or discussion panel instead of doing what many men do -- trouncing ahead and declaring ourselves the experts we are already. The more women we have on stage, the less likely gender bias will push them away.

Men: strongly consider not taking part in panels or events that make no attempt at gender parity. Make it your pledge to not sit on an all male panel this year. Your absence makes a difference to changing the visibility of women.

People in charge of events, groups, podcasts, and public relations in general: download this PDF each month and reach out to women. Encourage other women to add themselves to this list. Make your user stories more diverse. Seek gender parity in your beta teams. Look for fresh voices for your panels and podcasts.

On the eve of this year’s NAB Show, consider asking vendors and programmers why their panels or demo artists are mostly men, and share this document with them.

When we think of experts in post production, women should not be invisible or limited to a list of token individuals that can be counted off from memory. By making gender parity a priority for our extracurriculars, we’ll all help reinforce that women ARE experts — and that kind of influence will make an impact on the subconcious gender bias that keeps women from thriving in post. Our most public individuals should represent the working community we're striving to create.

There is no shortage of female experts in post -- let's put them on stage so they can impact the next generation of post professionals.

[If you would like to receive an updated version of this PDF on a regular basis, email womeninpostpr@gmail.com to be added to the distro list.]